That night my father spoke many sweet words to win her over, and his snoring that night was even more contented than usual.

My mother held me as we slept on the small bed in the storage room next door.

She kept murmuring, over and over:

“He used to be so good to me. He’ll be good to me again, won’t he?”

I asked, “And now?”

She turned her head slowly to look at me, her eyes glistening.

“He used to be so good to me. Before you came along, he was truly good to me. If you hadn’t been born—if you hadn’t been born, would things be—”

I said nothing. I only looked deeply at her, my eyes filled with grief.

I had thought this heart of mine could no longer hurt any further.

She suddenly seemed to wake to what she’d just said.

She pulled me close, shaking her head, explaining, “Qingqing, Mama didn’t mean it that way. Mama didn’t mean it that way at all.”

She kept murmuring quietly to herself until I finally fell asleep.

The next afternoon, I came home from school.

There was no one in the house.

I pushed open the bedroom door. My mother, dressed in a brand-new white dress, lay still with her eyes closed on the marriage bed she’d shared with my father, their wedding photo hanging on the wall above her head.

Blood dripped slowly, drop by drop, from her wrist, nearly run dry by now.

A pool of half-dried blood stained the floor.

Her body had already gone stiff.

My mother had killed herself.

She died inside the dream she had woven for herself.

My father’s heart had long since gone hollow, but my mother always believed that come next spring, it would sprout again. In the end, all the hope she had gathered came to nothing, and it was she who died, body and soul together.

A genuine apology is repayment and redress; words alone are just a cheap trick to escape blame—so my father never deserved to be forgiven.

But my mother could never bring herself to accept that.

I was eleven that year. From then on, I no longer had a mother.

From then on, all the storms of life came crashing down on me alone.

My father’s fury, too, fell entirely on me now.

No one held me to sleep anymore. No one called me Qingqing anymore.

My mother’s fragrance vanished from our home, replaced by the stench of alcohol and cigarettes filling every room.

After my mother died, my father showed no grief at all—instead he cursed her for being ungrateful, and didn’t even give her a decent funeral.

Every time his drunken fists knocked me to the ground, what rose up in me afterward was a bone-deep hatred for him.

He hit me, and I called the police.

I had once naively believed that calling the police could solve everything.

But after he was locked up for three or five days, he came out angrier than before, and each time he hit harder than the last.

I was beaten until I vomited blood, beaten until I went temporarily blind.

Through countless spells of dizziness, I once believed I would die.

Sadly—I didn’t.

Perhaps it was because he was supposed to die before me.

I hated him. I hated myself even more.

I hated myself for being so cowardly, too afraid to fight back.

I hated myself for trembling uncontrollably the moment I saw him.

I hated myself for fearing something that wasn’t even worth as much as a beast.

It was this hatred that kept me stumbling forward, alive.

My days passed like a heap of rotting mud.

Giving off a stench that disgusted everyone around it.

Because my family was poor, because I had no mother to dote on me and no father to look after me, because my grades were average and I was withdrawn and silent—

I became the target of bullying among my middle school classmates.

They turned me into gossip fodder, isolating me on one hand and mocking me on the other.

Verbal violence, it turned out, was no less brutal than physical violence.

They never laid a hand on me, yet they still made me tremble all over.

In class, when I answered a question, they’d look at me with contempt, saying my voice sounded cheap, that I was deliberately putting on airs when I spoke.

After class, when I went to the bathroom, they’d loudly discuss how strangely I walked, saying I deliberately swayed my hips.

They stuck notes on my back, threw my homework around, gave me all kinds of humiliating nicknames.

They laughed at how oddly I dressed.

But they didn’t know about the fear, shame, and helplessness I went through alone when my body first began to develop.

I had no mother to teach me.

I didn’t know that girls my age were supposed to wear training bras.

To save money, I wore my mother’s old underwear.